what did we really want to do in Iraq?

[winterbadger]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4347636.stm

The picture that this article paints is pretty grim. Basically, it suggests that the British have more or less ceded all day to day policing and patrolling functions in Basra to the Iraqi authorities who are either complicit with or helpless in the face of action by the Shi'ite militias. Some people are unhappy with the violence and enforcement of extremist religious edicts by the militas but the elected government and the police are unwilling to confront the militants, either because they are afraid of them or because they agree with them.

The article doesn't address which of those two is more prevalent an attitude, but the US and the UK have to face the possiblity that the majority of Shi'a Iraqis would actually favour a more repressive relgiously-based social order, and that the majority of Sunni Iraqis might agree, though they would differ violently on the sectarian details.

I've always thought that the adminstration's rhetoric about our desire to bring democracy to the Middle East was empty window-dressing, manufactured to cover up the Bush family feud with Saddam Hussein and the desire of the former Bush I holdovers to punish Iraq forcefully in a way they never managed during the first Iraq war. And maybe that's true. But what if we get everything we say we came for: the end of the Ba'athist regime, the end of Iraq as a (conventional military or WMD) threat to its neighbors and the US, and democracy (of a very literal sort) in Iraq? And we just go home.

Responsible foreign policy thinkers said at the outset that Iraq was a tinderbox of ethnic and religious division, and it was dangerous to interfere with it. If we transform that into a nominally democratic tinderbox, have we done anyone, including the Iraqis, any favours? Americans are great at talking about how we favour democracy, but in the end we mean a very narrowly defined democracy that includes not only precepts like the people (variously defined) being allowed to govern their own country, but a specific representative kind of democracy that assumes basic rights for all citzens, that has checks and balances to keep one faction from becoming oppressive of all others, that assumes a basic common vision among the people for what will achieve the nation's wellbeing. The narrowly defined system we have today, which is still in flux even now, is the result of centuries of development of democratic ideals both in the US and beforehand in Great Britain. I think we don't realize how ver customized it has become; even other democracies (like many in Europe, Israel, India, Japan, and Latin America) are strikingly different in their assumptions and expectations. Our system is tailored to us and to our culture. It can't be transplanted overnight into another country with a fundamentally different culuture, different history, different religious factions. We can make it a democracy, but are we prepared to accept that, even if that democracy continues, it will take on a very different form and appearance than our own?

Will we be sorry we didn't set up yet another imperialist autocracy that, while not democratic or representative, would be less harsh on those portions of the country's population that we might most closely identify with? Educated Iraqis are leaving in droves; the people who are needed to build a tolerant, diverse democracy are being driven out of the country by the insurgency and by those who control some of the (relatively) stable portions of the country. Meanwhile the factionalists all remain armed, the government is being staffed up based on political and religious credentials instead of merit and ability, and all the signs point to a legislature that will exist in a semipermanent pattern of gridlock.

Maybe we are creating a democracy *and* achieving just what we intended: a state just stable enough not to completely implode, but one which is too damaged and riven by internal unrest to pose any kind of threat to its neighbors. After all, in the wonderfully flawed logic of the administration, if Islamic terrorists are fighting each other in the Middle East, they'll be too busy to attack us here. (No matter that 7 July put paid to that theory--it's still being repeated, as if perhaps repetition will lend it strength).

Comments

[winterbadger]

I'm not sure whether the neo-cons really wanted democracy in Iraq or not. I was just reflecting on the fact that, even if that's what we're trying to promote, it begs the question: what *kind* of democracy? Even if we somehow manage to help steer the new constitution into place, some sort of representative democracy takes over, and we continue to step back from the security situation like a parent who has taken the train wheels off his kid's bike. If the insurgency can be reduced to something less constantly debilitating as Chechnya but still more violent than the worst of Northern Ireland, and the Iraqis are actually electing governments under the proposed constitution and showing us their version of democracy. Is it going to be something that, at another time and another place (Kossovo, Haiti) the US would have invaded to stop?